


Brothers

by mad_like_a_lynx



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: 1980s, Character Study, It is war, M/M, Pre and post-canon, Vietnam War, and war isn't pretty
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-06 09:36:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18848389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_like_a_lynx/pseuds/mad_like_a_lynx
Summary: More is lost in time than what is remembered.Aslan and Griffin would never get the chance to tell one another many things._____A series of one-shots comparing the lives of two very different brothers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't see enough about Griffin. Honestly, if I were to pick the most tragic character in BF, it would probably be him. What a strong and lovely man. 
> 
> Anyway, I wanted to write about Griffin's past and thought about paralleling it with Ash. They share a lot of similarities while still living in very different worlds (Plus I wanted to write Griffin with little Aslan). 
> 
> Cheers!

Griffin spent his eighteenth birthday up to his nose in the Mekong Delta. After a rough storm, severe damage littered the loading basin, and the wooden structure erected back in '66 had to be rebuilt.

 

His boots were swallowed up by the muck and his arms were gray with it. The swamp was vast and thick with mud, and it proved difficult to keep the new construction from sinking back into the earth.

 

The men in his detail laughed when he lost his boot and fell face first into the bank, rising to his knees dripping with grime. He forced a grin with a mouth tasting of dirt, but fatigue was setting in. It twisted in his guts as his vision browned from the sun, and he knew right away that he wasn't made for this.

 

"Hey kid, seems you're taking to the work alright," the lieutenant lit a cigarette as an army of men caked with mud huddled around the fire. It was after dinner and their dessert was alcohol and malaria pills. "Callenreese, right?"

 

Griffin nodded. A kid with rusty hair and glasses called him a Paddy and took a swig of whiskey mixed with water.

 

"Don't worry about fucking up," he continued, "or what any of these old bastards say. Nobody is perfect first week on the job. Like Emerson there, he laughs but his first day in this hell-swamp he went under for a good twenty seconds. Took two men to pull him out." He passed the cigarette to him, "At least you don't fucking complain like these other goddamn assholes."

 

Griffin never thought of himself being able to do much of a good job at anything, so he smiled, then sucked on the cigarette. After a day of hard work, the nicotine made his aching muscles relax.

 

"Where you come from?"

 

"Massachusetts."

 

"Naw, man. I meant before this. You didn't just get to the jungle, did you?"

 

"No, sir. I was in the capital for about a week. Think there was some kind of mix-up..."

 

The lieutenant smiled; half mocking, half sympathetic. Griffin didn't need to ask to know what he was thinking.

He liked books and could speak with confidence, but on paper, he was but a summary of red marks and a low number on an aptitude teat. It took almost five days for assignment before he was shipped off to join the clean-up crew on the delta, a battalion made up of cheap body-fodder.

 

"Pretty sure you're in the right place," the lieutenant said, then took back the cigarette.

 

"Guess so," Griffin replied.

 

Lights lit up the distance, then a faint rumble. The kid next to him whistled before asking for a shot of whiskey.

 

"Hey, bastards who squatted here before left this," a kid approached the fire with an old guitar. It was dirty with grime but seemed salvageable. "Anybody play?"

 

Griffin shyly raised his hand. The other guys whooped and hollered as the old thing was shoved into his lap. As he stretched and tuned the strings he thought about his little brother, who must be waking up right about now, over a thousand miles away.

 

He picked the strings, tried out a C chord. It sounded alright.

 

_went down to the shore_

_a boat was waiting for me_

_o-oh o-oh_

 

_took me and Dinny across the sea_

_o-oh o-oh_

 

_we planted our flags in the soil_

_o-oh o-oh_

 

_and Dinny watered them with his blood_

_o-oh o--_

 

"God _dammit_ , Callenreese! Don't you have anything fucking happier to play?" Griffin paused.

 

"... Sorry, sir."

 

_there was a lady in the mountains_

_her eyes burned fiery red and green_

_the grass grew long around our feet_

_in that garden_

_where we met_

 

_she gave me a kiss_

_that I would never forget_

_in that garden_

_where we met_

 

_now I share a bed_

_with the devil_

_oooh o-oh oh_

 

_and the devil_

_shares a bed with me_

_oooh o-oh oh_

 

_she once loved so kindly_

_oooh o-oh oh_

_in that garden_

_where we met_

 

In 1973, a life cost an average of 24 cents, about 3 rounds from a .22 long rifle. This made the expense reports easy. (Two-hundred dead bodies, about eighteen dollars in bullets.)

 

It cost less than a cent to kill the dog. Griffin couldn't recognize the breed, but the tail curled like a pig and the white fur was stained with dirt. Feet stood firm in the mud, a dutiful soldier keeping watch.

 

Griffin managed to shoot the animal in the head, an instant kill, then watched as the body crumbled into the muck. This was the first time he ever killed anything and his entire body quaked. He vomited.

 

The Vietcong had settled in a small village further down the delta, and command ordered Griffin's detail to make sure ownership of this tactically useful land was reassigned. Nobody trusted him to steady his hand long enough to shoot a person, so Sargeant "Scout" Barnes tasked Griffin with killing the guard dogs who loyally scouted the compound.

 

He shot six dogs that night. In the darkness he could see their large and marble-like eyes glitter before they died, a soul's final breath.

 

It reminded him of that time when he was eleven and his father took him hunting. The gun shook in his hands when he saw the doe, but his father got a buck. The deer had the same look in its eyes as all of those dead dogs.

 

Every dog he ever shot came for him in his dreams. Their snouts emerged from the muck, faces bobbing like corks and running sticky with blood. In the swampy darkness, they slithered. Paws pushed through the grime, tongues lathed as white fangs burned bright and sharp. The barking echoed in his head.

 

Each and every time the dogs came for him at night, all he could think about was that hunting trip as a child, where his father had left a bruise on his cheek and screams in his ears. That had been his punishment, for allowing that first deer to get away.

 

* * *

 

In 1981, Blazer flooded the market with non-reloadable cartridge cases made of aircraft-grade aluminum. These casings were cheaper than brass but still loaded with the same highly effective ammunition.

 

That was how Ash Lynx came to stand in an alleyway on Murray Ave, his gun hot with powder and a man dead on the concrete.

 

The dead man was an artist once, and Ash's wrists bore his handiwork. Years ago he rubbed in those scars with rope until they were red and scaly like a snake.

 

That had been okay, since Ash could take it. But then he spotted the club's new boy with a long, scabby scar on his back. It was in the shape of a bird.

 

The bullet cracked open his skull like an egg. His eyes did not flicker or hollow out, simply ceased to be, like his baseball coach did when he was eight.

 

It was his second kill, and he felt nothing.

 

A man named Jenkins, a stubby Italian detective who worked the east side precinct, cut him a deal.Some of his cronies caught him working Times Square a week before, desperate for cash and a meal. He could tell Jenkins was a good man, but still saw Ash as a simple whore.

 

The handcuffs itched old scars as he asked questions. In a kind voice, he explained the situation, said all would be forgiven if Ash helped them.

 

"We don't want to send you to juvie," Jenkins told him. Ash could only smirk, this guy really had no idea.

 

"We have a morgue full of blonde boys," he continued. "You could help us catch him, Ash."

 

Jenkins removed a Polaroid from the file and presented it to him. On the concrete lay a little boy, maybe thirteen, curled into a tight ball. Rope constricted his tiny body in strange patterns while his arms had been shoddily removed, stitched onto his back like a cruel pair of wings. 

 

"Bastard thinks of himself as some kind of artist," Jenkins said.

 

It took everything in Ash not to smile. This man was already dead, but he could still help these cops. There was more than one sicko in this city who liked blondes.

 

He searched his mind for the right one, another who deserved to pay and would go down easy. If only that Marvin fuck wasn't so slimy.

 

There was a guy from the club who liked him. He enjoyed drugging his boys, and Ash thought he should give him a call.

 

He took the job. A few days later he watched Jenkins oversee the arrest, shoving the asshole into the back of a cop car. The man knew he had been played and kept his eyes tight on Ash. He waved.

 

Ash was the devil of Hell's Kitchen at the cusp of fourteen.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my friend Piro for the Spanish proverb in this chapter!

* * *

Griffin's only goal was to get out of this jungle alive. He wasn't particularly patriotic, held only a vague idea of what communism was or stood for, and knew nothing of what burning some remote village on the other side of the world had anything to do with the one he left behind.

 

And the jungle slit the throat of his confidence. Griffin Callenreese thought he knew who he was, but in the jungle, that person devolved into a shivering child pretending to be a man.

 

In the capital he could crawl into the back of his mind and stay there, watching his life as one would through the scope of a camera. This helped convince himself that everything here was a haunting dream, maybe even a fucked-up movie, and anytime he wanted he could simply walk away.

 

His second night in the jungle, a mortar hit their camp, killing two soldiers and injuring two others. One GI lost a leg up to his knee, and Griffin remembers staring as it sunk into the mud before some kid from rural Kentucky wrapped it up in butcher paper. He helped haul the screaming form onto a stretcher and noticed with horror that flies had already begun to lay eggs in the wound.

 

That was when the movie ended. This is my life, he realized, and the following night he struggled not to cry as he shook in panic under the protection of mosquito nets.

 

He kept a journal to make the abstract become something more concrete, more tangible. It was confusing to realize that even the last few days were a blur, that nearly all of his memories were shadowy and fragmented, a stew of unrelenting boredom and mundane nothingness.

 

It went like this: Griffin knew he kept watch that night, knew he took a piss, knew he ate a bowl of rice for dinner, but couldn't remember a second of it. He could however faintly recall how a Sargent from New Mexico told a story around the fire about pulling a stubborn leech out of a young soldier's ass, and that he told it vibrantly and with such enthusiasm that the group laughed until their lungs were sore. Fear and Death can make anything funny if you tell the story the right way.

 

They were so young. How had he never realized how young he was before?

 

He thought about his little brother a lot. Especially now, it was August and Aslan would be celebrating his 6th birthday.

 

Griffin wrote a lot of letters to Aslan, but there were many things a child could not and should not understand. If he wrote honestly, Aslan would have read about sleeping in a haze of muddy mosquito nets and marijuana smoke. That gunfire sounded like an orchestra of busy sewing machines, that these bullets drank your blood less than the leeches would. About fear, how death had a sound.

 

But Griffin had no intentions of being honest.

 

_Many strange monsters live and play in the jungle. There are lizards who fish for crabs in the morning and birds at night, bears the size of cats, frogs the colors of the rainbow and others the color of trees._

 

_While monkeys hide and feast on fruit in the canopy, tigers milk their young and large, monstrous horned birds bark like dogs. There lives another lizard, who I have yet to have the pleasure of meeting, who takes great joy in singing. Every night you can hear him cry "youuu" "youuu" and "hiiii" "hiiii" into the darkness._

 

_Then there is the water buffalo. They are large and powerful, but gentle. Every morning I watch them drift through the rice paddies, working as dutifully as any person. They quack and swim like ducks. Children care for and ride them into the fields, and often I imagine you in their place, Aslan. You would laugh if you saw them, climb up onto their backs and smile._

 

_Did you know that the water buffalo once had sharp teeth like a tiger? I'm sure you think that I am silly, but it's the truth. An old wise man told me, and he knows every story about this place._

 

_Just imagine, a buffalo with the teeth of a wild cat. If one barred those teeth in your direction, I bet you would still try to pet his nose. You have always been brave like that; sure that you are still being brave, even now._

 

 

_Do you know how tigers got their stripes, Aslan? Long ago, there was a water buffalo who toiled every day in the paddies. Even though he was strong and his teeth were long and sharp, he worked alongside his human as an equal._

 

_One morning, as the buffalo waded through the paddies, a tiger approached. The buffalo stiffened and stared, but the tiger only smiled._

 

_"I come as a friend, not an enemy," said the tiger, "and only wish to ask you a question."_

 

_The buffalo, understandably curious, perked his ears. "Everyday I see you work the fields," the tiger continued, "to no reward. Why is it that you let this defenseless creature, with no claws or teeth, tell you what to do?"_

 

_The water buffalo only smiled, said that he had never thought about it before. "But," the buffalo began, "I do know that humans possess a very rare amulet called 'intelligence.'"_

 

_Intrigued, the tiger approached the human and inquired about where he could get some of his intelligence. The man only smiled and said, "We do not take it with us onto the paddies, but I do keep some inside my home."_

 

_The tiger's bright eyes burned, intensely curious. Desperately did he want to have a taste of this human power._

 

 _"But," the man said, "I will have to tie you up. You are a tiger, and I worry to leave my buffalo alone with you_ _."_

 

_Thinking this reasonable, the tiger agreed, and was tied to a tree on the edge of the paddies. He watched as the human disappeared inside his hut, then returned clutching thick bundles of straw. The straw was set at the tiger's feet and set a-light._

 

_"Behold, my intelligence!"_

 

_The tiger screamed and writhed in his bondage until the fire gobbled up the ropes. He lept free, but the firey straw burned dark stripes into his fur._

 

_The buffalo, pleased at this mastery, laughed so hard that his large, sharp teeth cracked against a large stone. Buffalo and all of his descendants would lose their teeth, while the tigers inherited thick, black burns..._

 

All lies. He had yet to see the supposedly vast number of paddies on the delta, while most of the villagers had burned down to ashes with their homes. The rest was fairy tale nonsense. But he imagined Aslan smiling as he read his words about the silly buffalo who lost his teeth, and that was all that mattered.

 

Most of war was killing time, a lot of forgettable, hellish redundancy. The GIs would sit in the elephant grass and wait for carrion like vultures.

 

This heat was alien to Griffin, as was the thick glaze of sweat dripping down his back. The waiting made him dwell on the heat, and the heat made him nauseous. Every fibre in his being itched for something, anything, and he settled between pacing restlessly and nodding off into his knees.

 

A kid in the detail, a guy who thought going to West Point made him John Wayne, was vandalizing his helmet. He wrote bad poetry about the enemy and attached a plastic toy lion with rope.

 

"My family crest is a lion," he bragged, "and I'm going to strike fear into the hearts of these motherfuckers."

 

Griffin only smiled and nodded. Maybe he was only a dumb country boy who had never stepped foot inside some fancy academy, but the naivity of this kid was funny. He looked so ridiculously stupid, even crazy, with that hunk of plastic on his head.

 

"What the fuck is that, Glenreed?" Voices behind him, and Griffin looked. A GI with a marker in his hand, scribbling on his helmet, as his friend watched with disgusted humor.

 

He joined them, squinted, then asked, "What... is that?"

 

"Oh come on!" The GI with the helmet, Glenreed, threw up his hands. "I know I suck at drawing, okay? But it's not _that_ bad."

 

The other GI, Mendez, shook his head. "It's pretty fucking bad, brother. At least nobody is gonna steal your helmet now."

 

"Now that's just mean," he crossed his arms and looked tired. Mendez chuckled, and Griffin couldn't argue. The drawing was utterly unintelligible, like something a small child would do. "It's supposed to be a boar."

 

"You're more likely to get that thing lookin' like a pair of hairy balls."

 

Glenreed only sighed, and Griffin went to his level. "I can fix that for you," he said.

 

Blinking, Glenreed shrugged, but handed it over, "You can draw?"

 

"Not very well," he replied, and made new lines over old ones.

 

"Heeey." Glenreed laughed, patting him on the back. "Not bad!"

 

Griffin studied his drawing, relatively pleased. A quote, slightly smeared from days in the jungle heat, had been written above it: _quien con lobos anda a aullar se enseña_.

 

Glenreed noticed him staring. "Ah, Mendez wrote that. Think it means something like, 'He who companies with wolves learns to howl.' He says I'm too soft and should take it to heart."

 

"Ah." He handed the helmet back.

 

"I'm Max, by the way. Don't think we've met before."

 

He held out his hand. Griffin took it and shook, grinning wryly. "I know, we were in orientation together."

 

Max blinked slowly, then looked embarrassed. "Right, right!" A large, nervous smile.

 

"You don't remember me," he kept his grin.

 

More embarrassment, but pleasant laughter. "Ah... who remembers things in the jungle, man?" Griffin chuckled, he couldn't disagree.

 

"It's fine. I'm Griffin."

 

"Griffin..." Glenreed tried the name on his tongue. "Like a lion!"

 

He smiled.

 

That night, in the company of howlers, on his helmet Griffin drew the large head of a wolf.

 

 _Quien con lobos anda a aullar se enseña_.

 

* * *

 

Ash met his first friend in juvie and learned that sometimes devils can look like angels. 

 

 


End file.
